Source Code

This is a little program that init runs to have a user
automatically logged in at some terminal all the time.
It’s intended for laptop computers and home PCs where
only one person is likely to be using the machine.

The weblog program I wrote for julie.
This one has the features that it’s all written in C, it
uses static pages for all content, it provides syndication
feeds in both RSS 2 and Atom 0.3 format, and it uses the web
server authorisation system for user security. It’s not either
complete or documented yet, so it’s still a work in progress,
but it’s a work in progress that I’m actually using.

Sources to the automatic moderation robot I
wrote for the newsgroup soc.singles.moderated.
I wrote the ‘bot as a contract and the current production
version has diverged from it, but I ran the newsgroup
on gehenna for about 3 months with this code.

My remake of the GNU autoconf program. The big
differences here (aside from the trivial things like the
size of the contributerbase and the detail that it works
on non-gnu machines) are that configure is a pure
shell program, it’s released under a BSD-style license,
and it doesn’t require loading a great long GNU toolchain
to work.

The copy of Vixie-cron on pell kept falling over every 100
days or so. I looked briefly at it, but couldn’t find a screamingly
obvious reason. So I threw it out and wrote my own.

Cron is a mainly vixie- and posix- compatable cron daemon;
it falls short by not supporting the traditional system crontab
(in /etc/crontab? Maybe /usr/share/crontab?)
and not supporting some of the fancier aspects of the vixie-cron
crontab format (no symbolic names for days of the week or months,
no fancy parsing of environment variables,) but it makes up for
it by being much smaller, and, at least to me, easier to read.

Cwatch is a log watcher much like the well-known
swatch utility.
Unlike swatch, cwatch is written in lex, yacc,
and C, so it can run on a system that doesn’t have perl
(or, as in my case, on a system where I don’t have the dynamic
linking capacity that modern versons of perl require.)

This is a lightweight firewall that runs on a
webshield kernel and blocks
tcp connections. It’s not the best firewall on the
planet, because an intruder can still find out what ports
are listening on the other side of the firewall, but
it does the trick. This code is all BSD-licensed,
so it doesn’t come with any nasty strings attached.

I reinvented the wheel, again, and wrote my own version
of init to ship with Mastodon. It’s not a complete clone of
all of the other inits out there (except for the netbsd init,
which it predates), but it

contains an internal services database, so rc scripts can
be registered with init for easier shutdown later.

This is a multipurpose printer filter program that
H. P. Anvin wrote several years ago. In 1999, he lost interest
and I volunteered to take it over.
Magicfilter uses libfile
to do file type checking and m4 as a printr file preprocessor,
plus it uses a much more compact printer filter language than 1.2 did.

My replacement for libdialog. It’s smaller,
less kludgy, and slightly more flexible.
I built it against ncurses, and have modified it since then
so that it will also work with BSD curses (with arrow and
function key support) and so it’s slightly portable; these
days I can build it on Mastodon against BSD curses or ncurses,
and FreeBSD against ncurses.

The cloud around this silver lining is that it’s not
documented very well, and it hasn’t been maintained for
six years because I’ve not been working on the Mastodon
installer.

Bothered by spam? Don’t want to upgrade your machine to
modern libraries and load up a new copy of a big
fancy SMTP server to deal with spam? You can do what I
did and write your own, or you can use this one that I
cranked out in a month of evenings, and which only has
a couple of missing bits of functionality.

My reimplementation of the Linuxpstree utility.
This is not just a case where I reinvented the wheel because
I could – no, I wanted a pstree that would work across all
of the platforms I use (Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS)
without having to deal with the BSD ports system.

This program was originally an Ada program that I got from an
Ada BBS in Madison, Wisconsin, and rewrote in Pascal on the Terak.
From the Terak, it was converted into a C program on the Atari ST,
finally migrated to the IBM PC, then was forgotten about for almost
a decade starting on Nov 8, 1992 (which was sometime around the
point where I quit dual-booting DOS and Linux).

But now that I’ve rediscovered it, it’s going into
Mastodon as a productivity tool.

A clone of the SLang rgrep program that
uses curses instead of slang. I wrote it after
stumbling over trying to port the SLang rgrep
forward to a modern commercial linux and having
it fail horribly because the development library
package was incomplete. I was thinking about
what to do for this problem one weekend, and
realized that if you struck the regular expression
language the rest of the program was very simple
to write. So I grabbed a copy of Henry Spencer’s
BSD-regex library, modified it so it looked more
like the SLang RE library, and constructed a grep
around it. After a few mishaps having to do with
developing it on a Mac, I made it portable and published
it here.

My reinvention of the log rotation wheel. It’s
not much different than any of the other log aging
programs out there, except I wrote it and it’s been
designed so that I can feed it command scripts from
standard input. This code is part of
Mastodon, and was included as part of the first
incarnation of the McAfee antiviral firewall
WebShield, which I designed.

When I started to give people virtual domains on my servers, I
soon discovered that there weren’t that many tools written (at
least not very many tools written in the
One True Language or that would be glued into
sendmail) and so I needed to write them myself.
Eventually, I dumped sendmail for
Postoffice,
so I migrated the tools over to postoffice, where I continue to
use them today.

Pell and Mastodon still use the old Linuxa.out
executable format (I’ve got some almost 15 year old Linux
binaries on pell that work with libc 4.8.0, and I’m in no
hurry to replace them just because I can. Mastodon uses
a.out for kernel programs because it makes it a lot harder
to drop a rootkit onto the system and because it insulates
the system from whimsical gl*bc interface changes,) so I
have to maintain the library because nobody else will.

Other older projects may be found in the archive, and
some of my more horrible hackery is kept in the partsbin
in case I want to salvage useful snippets out of it.